Mark Brewer

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams The government wants staff to shun Silicon Valley and shift to its home-grown Visio platform instead.

UK government, I beg you: please please ban me from using Teams

ICE detains five-year-old Minnesota boy arriving home, say school officials Superintendent says Liam Ramos and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway and sent to Texas

‘Terrible things are happening outside… Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return… to find their families gone.’
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Good decisions need good analysis! BioSS partnered with the Office for Environmental Protection to independently review how environmental trends are assessed.

Read more on our website: www.bioss.ac.uk/case-studies...

And the report: www.theoep.org.uk/commissioned...

Dame Professor Lorna Dawson talking to George Burgess, Director of Agriculture and Rural Economy for Scottish Government, and Professor Wendy Russel at Scotland's Global Food Security Conference 2025. Photo Credit: Chris Watt.

SEFARI Gateway would like to extend a huge congratulations to our Knowledge Broker for the Environment, Professor Lorna Dawson has been appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the New Year Honours List. 🎉

🔗 SEFARI Gateway Blog - tinyurl.com/LornaDawson

title: Cheap science, real harm: the cost of replacing human participation with synthetic data author: Abeba Birhane abstract: Driven by the goals of augmenting diversity, increasing speed, reducing cost, the use of synthetic data as a replacement for human participants is gaining traction in AI research and product development. This talk critically examines the claim that synthetic data can “augment diversity,” arguing that this notion is empirically unsubstantiated, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful. While speed and cost-efficiency may be achievable, they often come at the expense of rigour, insight, and robust science. Drawing on research from dataset audits, model evaluations, Black feminist scholarship, and complexity science, I argue that replacing human participants with synthetic data risks producing both real-world and epistemic harms at worst and superficial knowledge and cheap science at best

I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public

synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf

Just overheard my son, on the computer with his mates, using ‘you absolute AI’ as an insult.

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’ AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’
AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’
@aishadown.bsky.social for @theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

BioSS Rob Kempton Lecture & Annual General Meeting 2025 Over Monday 24th and Tuesday 25th November, BioSS came together to meet in Edinburgh for our 2025 Rob Kempton Lecture and Annual General Meeting.

Earlier this week, we came together in Edinburgh for our BioSS Rob Kempton Lecture & Annual General Meeting 2025.

These two days were an excellent celebration of the diverse, impactful work BioSS continues to deliver for an ever-increasing range of stakeholders.

Read more about it on our website:

Adapting Education to the Climate Transition: A collaborative workshop for change BioSS participated in a multi-actor and multi-generational workshop on rethinking how education meets the demands of the climate transition.

Our colleagues Esther Jones and @kateywhyte.bsky.social contributed to delivering a multi-generational workshop, bringing together young people, educators, academics, and industry leaders. 🌍

Read more about the project here:
www.bioss.ac.uk/case-studies...

Funded by @sefariscot.bsky.social.

AI browsers are here, and they're already being hacked Hackers can target AI browsers with prompts hidden in websites.

Say what you want, but these companies’ commitment to releasing half baked, insecure, or just plain dangerous products is something to behold.

S.C. presenting his poster at the workshop

M.K. presenting his poster at the workshop

Our colleagues @spcatterall.bsky.social & Martin Knight attended the ModStatSAP network UK - France Workshop 2025 in Paris last week and presented work on “Modelling disease spread when the populations at risk are poorly mapped” & “Disease risk-based trading in the Scottish cattle trading system”

This year’s SEFARI Science for Life Lecture, hosted by @bioss.bsky.social, was delivered by David G. Farquhar FRGS - a talk that championed throwing out the rule book and finding your niche.

As he put it, ‘Science is a chance to be daring.’

We tried to tell y'all to stop calling everything "AI" many years ago and you just wouldn't listen and now the poor machine learners must also suffer alongside the statisticians 😜

Inside a Seabird Colony: Tracking the Spread of Avian Influenza Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has caused unprecedented mortality in wild birds and led to the culling of millions of poultry worldwide. Since 2021, this ongoing global outbreak has severely...

Check out this new publication from our Dave Ewing, on tracking the spread of #AvianInfluenza inside a #seabird colony.

📰 Read the summary: www.bioss.ac.uk/case-studies...
📕 Read the full paper: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

@daveewing.bsky.social @animalecology.bsky.social

Kind reminder that the registration deadline for the SEFARI Science for Life Lecture 2025 is today! tinyurl.com/mv3smw57

"Giving life to your science so it impacts the transformation of agriculture, environment and society" by David G Farquhar FRGS

🗓️Friday Oct 24th
⏰12:30 - 3:30pm
📍Edinburgh

Left to right: Professor Calum Semple, Dr Gillian Mitchell, Dr Amanpreet Kaur, Dr Grant Henderson and Professor Mat Williams.

🎉 A HUGE congratulations to the winners of the ENRA conference poster session

🥇Oana Petre @rowettinstitute.bsky.social
🥈Amanpreet Kaur @hutton.ac.uk
🥉Gillian Mitchell @moredunfoundation.bsky.social

The early career researcher prize went to Grant Henderson @bioss.bsky.social

Science for Life Lecture Science for Life Lecture hosted by Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland

📢 Last chance for the 2025 SEFARI Science for Life Lecture organised by @bioss.bsky.social!

How can we better deploy science to create impact? - David G Farquhar FRGS

🗓️Friday Oct 24th
⌛12:30 - 3:30pm
📍Edinburgh Training and Conference Venue

Register by tomorrow! 17th Oct: tinyurl.com/mv3smw57

Stewart Lee: The thugs have taken my flag. So I’ve taken theirs What do you do with a lot of cheap banners hanging from motorway bridges once you’ve torn them down?

🔗 Read the full piece

www.thenerve.news/p/stewart-le...

A nice thread highlighting key findings from our new paper estimating parameters of #HPAI in subsequent outbreaks in common terns. We developed a Bayesian inference approach to infer parameters from just carcass counts. #seabirds #statisticalecology #diseaseecology

doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Research impact?
#highered #university

One path to a successful career as a columnist is to be repeatedly wrong. Not to have unique takes on matters of opinion, but confident declarations proven wrong by events. If you can condescend to people proven right no matter how often you are wrong, the most prominent media would like to pay you.

Science for Life Lecture Science for Life Lecture hosted by Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland

Join us at the SEFARI Science for Life Lecture 2025!

Giving life to your science so it impacts the transformation of agriculture, environment and society
by David G Farquhar FRGS

🗓️Friday Oct 24th
⏰12:30 - 3:30pm
📍Edinburgh Training and Conference Venue

Register by 17th Oct: tinyurl.com/mv3smw57

Wikipedia:
▫️Free
▫️Sources at the bottom
▫️Full edit history
▫️Discussion page to check controversies
▫️Openly stated editing policies
Academia: "This isn't trustworthy!!"

AI:
▫️Literally none of the above and, usually, the complete opposite
Academia: "I guess we have to embrace this!"

President's blog: Reflections on a record breaking RSS Conference

960+ people. 4 days. 1 unforgettable conference. Thanks to everyone who made #RSS2025 such a standout event!

Our president John Aston shares some reflections, including a timely reminder that transparency is key to trust in official stats 👉 rss.org.uk/news-publica...

We're heading to the @royalstatsoc.bsky.social International Conference this week in Edinburgh! 📊

Our team are contributing to the exciting programme by leading 11 sessions, giving 11 talks, and presenting 2 posters.🎤🗣️

Hopefully see you there!
#RSS2025Conf #RSS2025 #Statistics

Global tracking of marine megafauna space use reveals how to achieve conservation targets The recent Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) sets ambitious goals to protect, conserve, and manage at least 30% of the world's oceans in an effort to halt the loss of important mari...

BioSS researcher Dr Ana Couto worked with a team of international scientists who tracked over 100 marine species of large vertebrates to identify the most critical locations for conservation in the global ocean. 🌍🌊

Read more here: www.bioss.ac.uk/case-studies...

#conservation #marinebiology

Some terrible chaffing there.

Article on BBC news. Title: AI designs antibiotics for gonorrhoea and MRSA superbugs Description: Two new potential drugs have been designed by AI to kill drug-resistant bacteria, in a major Massachusetts Institute of Technology study.

I really dislike how science has started calling almost any fancy computational technique AI. 🧪

The framing of this entire article makes it sound like a benevolent AI independently made these drugs.

That is *pure fantasy*.

Instead: a team of scientists made a machine learning model for a study.

Registration is now open to attend the one-day workshop on “Statistical Challenges in the Agri-Environment Sector” organised jointly by the BIR (British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society) and NABES (UK Network of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statisticians).